The president has coupled his commitment to boost spending as needed for economic recovery with a promise to cut spending as required for fiscal responsibility. Hoping to save $40 billion a year in federal procurement spending, he has ordered his budget office to issue new guidelines by September 30, 2009, for awarding government contracts to private firms.

The problems at issue are prevalent and yet particular. Over the past several decades, RAND teams have identified many causes of excessive cost growth across U.S. government agencies, both civilian and defense. Causes range from faulty cost estimates for weapon systems at the outset of such programs to increased technological complexity and performance over the life of those programs. Still other causes pertain to the management of workforces and workloads in general and specifically in connection with the expanded use of contractor personnel.

Beyond identifying the key causes of rising costs, we offer suggestions for reducing government expenditures while enhancing government effectiveness. We summarize our conclusions here:

Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East on the Index of Political Freedom from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit — behind Israel, Lebanon and Morocco, but ahead of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis say they want a democracy, while only 19 percent want an Islamic state.

In short, there has been substantial progress on the things development efforts can touch most directly: economic growth, basic security, and political and legal institutions. After the disaster of the first few years, nation building, much derided, has been a success. When President Obama speaks to the country on Iraq, he’ll be able to point to a large national project that has contributed to measurable, positive results.

Interesting, general write-up by a senior BBC editor stationed in Baghdad. Also from the article: Before the invasion of Iraq, US Sec. of Defense, Donald

Rumsfeld was sent a careful, conscientious 900-page report by the state department containing detailed plans for the post-invasion period. He reportedly dumped it, unopened, straight into his waste-paper basket......A respected Iraqi dissident, who later became vice-president, has described how shocked he was to find, a few weeks before the invasion, that President Bush seemed wholly unaware that Muslims in Iraq were divided between Shia and Sunni Islam.....Gen Petraeus understood that insurgencies have a specific life-span, and he was fortunate enough to arrive in Baghdad at the time when the Iraqi insurgency was starting to wind down......Gen Petraeus's tactics turned the tide. At the height of the violence something like 100 people were dying each day across the country from bombings and shootings.

Now the number killed in political violence has dropped to about 10 a day - unacceptable in a more peaceable society, but a great relief here.

The heated national debate [about Cordoba House] is unrecognizable from the reality in New York, both politically and spatially. For starters, there are the practical questions of whether the Islamic center's politically unconnected organizers have the savvy and know-how to navigate the city's real estate universe or to put together the $100 million they need for their ambitious project. But if they somehow do, the city's entire political establishment supports their right to build on private property.

And no one in New York has any misconceptions about what Lower Manhattan looks like. Red cranes may slowly be rebuilding Ground Zero, but they are surrounded by a vibrant cityscape: doughnut shops and strip clubs and churches and mosques and synagogues and off-track betting parlors and podiatry centers.

"New York is a very unusual place in its density," explained Howard Wolfson, deputy mayor of New York who, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, wrote the speech that has thus far best articulated the case for the mosque, and which President Obama later echoed at an Iftar dinner with Muslim leaders at the White House. "I do not think the average person knows that you would not be able to see Ground Zero from this building, nor would you be able to see this building from Ground Zero.".....Raheel Sida, a 28-year-old from Queens who works in the financial industry, exited the mosque and expressed some chagrin at the circus around him.

"It's a local matter," he said. "People just need things to talk about."

The conflation of al-Qaeda attackers and a peaceful Sufi congregation led by a nationally known New York imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is frustrating, to say the least, to the center's organizers.

"The people behind this are New Yorkers," said Oz Sultan, a spokesman for Park51 and a fixture in the city's vibrant digital media community.........A unique confluence of personal credentials has given Jerry Nadler, a portly, intellectual legislator, unique authority on the mosque issue. He represents the district encompassing Ground Zero and is the chairman of the Constitution subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. He represents the liberal Upper West Side but also a right-wing Jewish stronghold in Brooklyn. Unlike the rest of the Democrats in the New York congressional delegation, who have said as little as possible about the issue, Nadler has unabashedly supported the congregation's right to build the mosque.

"It's only a slap in the face if you think that the people in the congregation are responsible for al-Qaeda," Nadler said as he sat in his office, where outdated posters, some featuring the Twin Towers, hung on the wall.

A staunch defender of Israel, Nadler said that it is logical that he is fighting for the rights of a Muslim congregation that he said he might very well vehemently disagree with. "Jews, of all people, should know that we have to support religious liberty," he said. "Because if you can block a mosque, you can block a synagogue."....

Nadler was most exercised about national Republicans who claim to speak on behalf of 9/11 survivors, despite refusing to support legislation to provide those same survivors with health care and economic compensation. He lamented their "cynicism," but also questioned their knowledge of the First Amendment.

"I tend to think that Sarah Palin probably doesn't [understand the Constitution]," Nadler said. "I think that Newt Gingrich is a very bright man; he probably understands it, at least intellectually. But he doesn't agree with it or care about it enough to avoid trashing the Constitution for political advantage."

In November of 2007, Jeff Deck encountered a sign that would change his life. He had just returned from his five-year college reunion at Dartmouth College, embarrassed by his lack of accomplishment in life, when, walking near his apartment in Somerville, Mass., he encountered a sign that had already stopped him in his tracks multiple times: "Private Property: No Tresspassing." The extra "s" in the sign had, as he puts it, long been "a needle of irritation" -- but now something had changed: He felt the urgent need to correct it.

In the days that followed, Deck decided to give his life some purpose (at least for a few months) and, several months later, set off on a road trip around the United States in order to document our country's many misspellings. He gave himself the mandate of correcting at least one spelling mistake every single day. Together with a rotating cast of friends, he traveled from the Northeast ("bread puding") to Georgia ("pregnacy test") to Wisconsin ("Milwuake Furniture") while documenting each mistake and each correction on his blog -- a mission that taught him about the breadth of America's language problem and its citizens strongly divergent attitudes toward the English language.

Orthodox Christians held the first Mass in almost 90 years at an ancient monastery on the side of a Turkish mountain Sunday, after the government allowed worship there in a gesture toward religious minorities.

At least 1,500 pilgrims, including from Greece and Russia, traveled to the Byzantine-era monastery of Sumela for the service led by Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians.

The Islamic-oriented government, which is aiming to expand freedoms as part of its bid to join the European Union, has said worship can take place at the monastery once a year. Services were previously banned.

The symbolic event was also likely to boost reconciliation efforts between Turkey and Greece, two NATO allies that came to the brink of war three times between 1974 and 1996 over the ethnically divided island of Cyprus and territorial rights in the Aegean Sea.

Detractors of the proposed Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan are worried about--well, I'm not sure they say with great reasonability what it is that they're worried about. Terrorism training, I guess. But, one thing is for sure: the issue seems to be about proximity to Ground Zero, and it seems to mean nothing else than that; it seems uninformed by knowledge of how Manhattan neighborhood-based non-profit institutions work.

Ever heard of the 92nd Street Y or the Jewish Community Center (JCC) at West 76th Street? These aren't exactly hotbeds of religio-political conservatism because--guess what?--such places don't survive in Manhattan in 2010. Just who's going to be at the Cordoba House community center during the day? Osama Bin Laden? Yeah, right. It's going to be senior citizens taking over-priced pottery classes. There'll be calligraphy courses teaching Arabic script. How deadly. Such disrespect shown toward...? Inkjet printers?

The community center like any other institution offering community center-like things anywhere in ultra-gentrified, 85%-Democratic-leaning, average household income of probably $290,000+ per year, at least $150 per square foot commercial property rental value downtown Manhattan is likely:

1. to be architecturally rather interesting and innovative (I hope),

2. offer vaguely interesting and basically benign programs, including ones aimed at kiddies and grandparents, and

3. be visited by "radicals" unlikely to be blind, raving jihadist clerics and far more likely to be out, lesbian students writing papers about Sufi mysticism for a class at Union Theological Seminary.

Do I think Iman Abdul Rauf can be to evasive in interviews, and that his comment that "the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened [on 9/11]" was a load of bollocks? Yup, I do--but, to be fair to him, his point seems to have been primarily that the US has in the past helped arm and train jihadists, which is, of course, completely true.

But just wait, if Cordoba House isn't at first quite like what I've described above, and maybe some nutter gets up at prayers and states that George Bush was behind 9/11 or that the 9/11 pilots did the right thing, it's going to be an exception to the rule to be sure. Religion doesn't really change New York all that much--never has. Rather, New York changes religion. That's the predominately moderating, diversifying, intellectualizing--and very, very rarely radicalizing--effect of the Big Apple. What is more, there will be scrutiny like you won't believe about every guest lecturer invited by and office supplies order dug out of the trash can of Cordoba House, and no fundamentalist iman's going to take root there. Not when there are workshops to plan on "Granadan astrolabes of the 1200s."

Give it a rest--unless the building ends up being another ugly concrete rectangle or office building-looking thing the likes of which Manhattan does not need. Then I'm all in favor of burning it down and letting Cordoba House get the insurance money. I mean, have you seen photos of Cordoba, Spain? Gorgeous! Iman Abdul Rauf, if this project ever even gets enough funding to seem truly plausible, please get a good, innovative architect!

Oh, and here's an astrolabe combining "Hebrew script with an ‘Islamic’ design and Christian features" made in about 1320 in Spain. There might some day be key fob versions of it for sale in the Cordoba House gift store.

The first episode is taken from Prospects of Mankind (1960), a [US] television series chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former US first lady. The subject: Britain's place in the rivalry of the cold war.

At 88, Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest 20th-century thinkers, battles for Britain's neutrality in a dangerous world. In Hugh Gaitskell 'the best prime minister we never had', some say, the grand old man of pacifism meets his match. The then leader of the Labour party argues for Britain's continued close relations with the United States and the need for nuclear arms to avert Armageddon.

Should Britain keep a nuclear deterrent? And continue to nurture its 'special relationship' with the White House? The current discussion over Trident was never more relevant.

Only 4 days left to listen to the Radio 4 Head to Head program examining the above-described great debate originally aired on television in 1960. Prospects of Mankind with Eleanor Roosevelt first aired on WGBH in October, 1959.